A Discovery of Strangers (20 page)

This is how it is, has been, will be. Before these feet felt this grain of land, they had decided it was empty; they have now been awarded that gift of emptiness to walk upon. Before they had looked through this air, these heads had decided it must be cold, so now cold fondles them with tender constancy. Malignant wind drives this snow just for them, lakeshores provide this brittle ice to slash their last, ragged canoe, rivers run with these icepans so beautifully white, so swift and clear at the head of rapids that, though they have been taught better, they are nevertheless tempted to try for a seemingly easy traverse. There, a mere interruption of water, the smooth head of it deceptive, the superb river poised in such elegance and folded to roar down its tight full throat of rapid, they will try crossing here because it is so narrow, they are certain they could throw a stone over it if they still had their usual strength. They
must
cross this river — and two others as well, when they meet them, though they do not yet know that those exist. As they did not know of this one either. They will be much weaker then, for the desolation of their decided ignorance clings to them as they ponderously move, an immense weight that, they may eventually realize, is heavier than anything else they carry. They will hear its relentless promise even after they have left everything else lying beside the imprints of their passing. It will say to them:

“I am your most faithful ignorance. I will go with you and be your guide, in your most need to go by your side.”

They have tried, are trying so valiantly to fill this desolating emptiness. With something — anything — perhaps their staggering, closely laid footprints will be enough; or their many things that they carry to drop: an ice-broken axe, a book, a piece of round metal, rifles, a spoon, various instruments, powder, books, forks, wine glasses. Blankets. Rifles again — but last of all. They have so much to leave behind, the blind with sticks could feel along their trail, the clang and texture of all their droppings — surely these will suffice, surely bodies will not be required. Thin snow hollows and angles a drift around some thing dropped, along a drag of English or voyageur foot, then freezes instantly, a twisted calligraphy whose strangeness the curious animals will read or smell tomorrow — or yesterday. A message no one will decipher. But determined ignorance will ride on each shoulder, will whisper so softly and tenderly:

“Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”

The canoe legs stagger, crumple two, by two, by two. The canoe smashes down again against a rock. Every animal is always a day away. Or more than a day, a week, a century, like heaven itself for ever away because rifle barrels sway, waver along the exhausted line of eyes trying desperately to see, to pray anything alive into accepting a lethal bullet. Bullets have become a mere whistle in this profligate overabundance of clear air, which accepts everything with such solicitous consideration: scream, shot, halloo, groan, cry, curse — but most tenderly it accepts silence. Will they ever hear an animal again? Eat meat — either hardened, or soft, or pounded into a mixture of filth and long hair — eat? Meat? Silence.

In a long bowl of rocks, into which wind can drive a little less snow, the canoe at last accepts a gentle fire. Small smashed pieces of it feed firelight against the cliffs, soften the roar of the rapids. A mess of rock moss and two tiny fish boils there. The vapour drifts upwards, faint as a weed bending in the muscle of a river, and eighteen men hunch together around it, try somehow to nurse warmth and smell into themselves before they can finally cup the one warm spoon they have, turn by turn, into their split and crusted mouths.

Bent across a rock, his tall, gaunt body pointing delicately towards that most dangerous river they have not yet seen but will most certainly have to cross, a man is vomiting. Who is it? Surrendering at last the last bit of his courageous ignorance back to the accepting earth?

Greenstockings cooks her favourite food for Hood. Keskarrah and Greywing sleep in a mound of robes; Birdseye breathes her implacable dream into the fur under which she has buried her face. The firelight, wavering smells, contains the cone of the lodge around them, the delicate seams of it doubled and sewn against the wind along the line of the generous animals cut open and skinned to protect them. Greenstockings stretches her bare arm, hand, fingers the deer stomach hung low in the heat of the fire braiding upwards; it swings like a bird’s nest, rocking, its shadow bulges, floating on the smoky hides.

“The round, beautiful kettles you bring,” she tells Hood, gently because she is not using one, “are strong, but also very heavy. They cook slower than hot stones in a bag. But they hold the heat of the food so well inside them, and there is never stone to eat then, hot stones in soup break themselves so often, you can never tell when one will do it, just split itself! and then you have to pick the biggest pieces out of the blood-soup as you eat, but there is always some left, stone cooking is hard on good teeth.”

She laughs, glances up for an instant at his listening intensity, laughing. “There is such strength in stone. It cleans you, scours you clean, you’re washing inside with sand whenever you shit!”

Robert Hood laughs to see her laugh, to make her laugh again, to lengthen the sound of her singing voice. Not understanding a syllable of any word she has ever spoken. And not
wanting to, nor thinking about that because her obsidian eyes flame firelight at him. She is laughing, and her head and naked shoulder flicker light so variously dark and lighter against the flames; the shadows beyond her on the sloping wall move continuously, this warm circular place where she has always lived, as if the lodge were breathing. The muscles at her shoulder and neck interfolded, lengthening under her copper skin.

“There is so much to eat here,” she murmurs.

The sounds she makes skim fondly about in his ears, sing, as every concentrated minute he watches her mouth, the bright tip of her tongue against her teeth, her lips — he has been trying to draw her lips for two days, to catch that bottom curve, the tilt of the corners where the sounds she makes seem to catch sometimes like a quick surprise — he does not want to understand any word she ever speaks. None. The freedom of watching, of listening with incomprehension, fills him with staggering happiness: all the reports they are duty-bound to write, the daily journal, the data piled in columns upon page after page — but in this warm place thick with indescribable smells there is no listable fact, not a single word. Never. Simply the insatiable influx of eye and uncomprehending, musical ear, of fingertips and skin. As if time could be eaten out of her hand, ingested and lived into one enveloping physical containment, all thought, all necessary decision, all duty gone. Vanishment.

“We can, together,” she says, “eat it all, all the sweet and bitter things I put into it.”

He feels so gloriously clean, surrounded only by release. Cocooned in warmth no one can find in their ultimately unbeatable cabin that is always full of endless duty where, beside the stone-and-clay fireplace he himself built with such ox-like
labour, he can never hold a pencil without mittens and the ink crystallizes between dips of the raven’s quill. Frost white as leprosy he has never seen before, but read about, blossoms along his wall bed between cracked mud and log. The blades of cold slice him long and thin to his very bones, and he loves the brittle beauty of that, the darkening logs, grey mud stroked to the tracks of fingers, the bristle of hoarfrost spidering parallel lines that waver between floor and ceiling. An austerity of ice, unnecessary to number or explain or record — or struggle to mirror somehow in a lined notebook.

So he speaks softly as he sees she is listening to his happiness, trying only to enourage again the rhythm of her voice, beyond his words that she in her turn will never understand either.

“I’m so warm here with you, it’s almost like … like sitting beside the fireplace in the manse kitchen in Bury, eight miles north of Manchester … though that fireplace is so huge and black and hard — I can walk to Bury in two hours, get off the eight-horse coach in Manchester and be — that’s silly, you’ve never seen a horse! — a kind of … ridable caribou, without antlers! — but heavier, more like a movable tree than a caribou! — and my mother knits in winter and our kitchen girl bends to move the pans with their long handles around, as my mother tells her to, on the grate inside the chimney. It’s higher than I am, standing, and I sit inside the chimney, the fire running low on the coals, and this is like that, not that blue fire but red — warm, warm, whenever I come in here, and it smells so different from black coal. Your hide walls are warmer than bricks baked with soot, all these orange flames of sap burning, like fresh apples in your mouth, apples from the cemetery behind St. Mary’s…! wish I could put one in your mouth, how can
your mouth never have felt an apple? Crisp, cracking between your beautiful teeth. And you smile, rocking that caribou gut full of whatever you’ve stuffed in there, I’d stuff you with anything you want.…”

He leans closer to Greenstockings, his words such sibilant sound, while they both stare intently into the fire, both bent forwards but aware only (she thinks, he thinks) of each other side by side, the leaping fire that draws them together without touching. How has she always existed here? How could he not know of it? In this circle of leather and fire as distant and unimaginable as the moon. He forgets his paper at last; his pencil falls, it bristles the edge of a flame unnoticed.

“Only my mother,” he whispers, “calls me ‘Robin’. Only when we are alone. She knits by the fire, these long green stockings for me, or mittens, and we play verses,? Robin, my little Robin,’ she sings, ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’ and I recite, ‘I, says the Sparrow, with my bow and arrow, and I killed.…’ ”

Greenstockings lays wood over the burning pencil he has forgotten; if he wants to draw more he can paint his fingers with ash. Why does he keep trying to make her outline on paper? If he wants it, why doesn’t he feel it with her face between his hands? Perhaps she can tell him that — her lips, if he felt them with one hand surely his other one could find them too, even at the end of a pencil or brush. He is different, so quick to understand and so stupid, she says to him whatever she wants and even without words he often does not know anything. Her hand lifts the blazing stick as she considers that: she has never thought it before about a man; she will tell him anything, whatever has always been unspeakable, his incomprehension gives her freedom.

But he is still too stupid, despite this gentle demandlessness that drifts about him. He sits for hours watching her, or whatever is done in the lodge, even Greywing or Keskarrah as they sleep, and he asks nothing, demands nothing, forces nothing to happen with his possible male domineering. As if he isn’t even a man, though he certainly is that, she has felt it. There is a quiet and patience in him, like a hunter dreaming animals to come when they want to — though she is certain he doesn’t think of animals, as if he has always had more than enough to eat — in what world could that be? — but that stillness in him is not at all like every man who has watched her, a piece of something to be groped for inside his thick head but that he won’t find there until he finally takes her between his hands, frees himself between her legs. She is certain he does not think like that, this stranger whom she sometimes believes she can understand. And when he isn’t there in the red, smoky warmth of the lodge she moves effortlessly, turns, works in what she comprehends to be the memory of his gentle tenderness, the kind of undemand he offers her humming a desire within her … strange … strange.

In the flames she sees the tiny orange spot they are together in the great land spread out by the white darkness of the moon, the shades of the enormous lights burning over them. The People call those lights “caribou running” because stroking the hide of an animal lifts and sparkles the same fire under your hand, the lights vanishing themselves and returning on the deep night sky. She can say it?

She says slowly, aloud, “In the long dark, there are always the animals, their hoofs like quick shovels, their running in herds over the sky lights the winter darkness, and on earth they feed on the fine white moss they dig for us, to feed us from the
ground they smell again, under the snow.”

Hood’s body intense, listening. No one intrudes with an acceptable understanding, and her happiness begins to dance with him. She says:

“They already feed our sky mothers, and our unborn children there, in the sky, the animals, and we see them most often in winter because it is then that their stomachs taste so sweet on earth, sweeter than mother’s milk. I heard my mother sing when she nursed me, and my father fed me too, the only way he could when I was little, when he brought her the meat to feed me as the moss feeds the animals who feed us now, and chewed the meat tender and wet for me so I could swallow. My mother sang,

Give me your stomach,
Sweet animal, I am praying to you,
Your beautiful sweet stomach
Filled with sky-white mosses
You have smelled out carefully for me,
Crisp, frozen milk of earth
Which I cannot drink by myself.
Chew it, milk it into my mouth;
Feed me.

And I will sing that song too. For you, I took this stomach out of the animal and poured in its blood and chewed small pieces of ribs and fat, chewed them soft mouthful by mouthful until there were enough to fill you, and spit them into the stomach until it was full, here it is, cooked and smoked too, full and wanting to be eaten, you can eat and I will eat with you, our
fingers feeding each other. Or would you like it frozen and sliced so thin we will see each other through our food, your mouth full of it like mine, our chins running with juice warm and frozen? I could feed you now, should I give you my breast, should I sing?”